About

Jeffrey Deitch has been involved with modern and contemporary art for more than forty years as an artist, writer, curator, dealer, and advisor. A 1974 graduate of Wesleyan University, Deitch went on to receive an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1978. Before opening his own art advisory firm in 1988, Mr. Deitch was a Vice President of Citibank where he developed and managed the bank’s art advisory and art finance businesses. In the 1970s, Deitch served as Assistant Director of the John Weber Gallery in New York and as Curator of the De Cordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Best known for his vanguard commercial gallery, Deitch Projects, Deitch produced more than two hundred and fifty projects by contemporary artists during the gallery’s existence from 1996 through 2010. In 2014, Rizzoli published Live the Art, a major monograph detailing the history of Deitch Projects.
Deitch has been active as a critic and curator since the mid-1970s. Deitch’s first important curatorial project was Lives, a 1975 exhibition about artists who used their own lives as an art medium. He co- authored a monograph on Keith Haring, published by Rizzoli in 2008, and wrote the introduction to “Jean Michel Basquiat, 1981: The Studio of the Street,” published by Charta in 2007. From 2010 to 2013, Deitch served as Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, where he organized major solo exhibitions of work by Urs Fischer, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Kenneth Anger and curated The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol and Art in the Streets.